WARRIOR SOUL: “Chill Fill” (Geffen)

PEDDLING STRANGELY anachronistic metal, these New York art rockers’ strong point is their ability to convert gear-grating crunch chords into something both new and yet familiar.

Warrior Soul’s sound is an amalgam of everything you’ve wanted a hard rock band to sound like but were always afraid to ask for. Frontman Kory Clarke has developed a new, more mature lyrical approach. Gone for the most part are the puerile utterances delivered on Last Decade Dead Century; instead a spicy mix of politics, religion, drugs and sex throw up targets for Clarke’s square-jawed admonishments and finger-pointing histrionics. Interestingly, the lullaby ‘Mars’ (“The sky awoke the sun/but the light escaped the womb/my work gently dies the man asks for the fare/God Bless America”) depicts the eerily compassionate face of Clarke’s otherwise darkly glowering expression.

While Clarke talks a good fight, it’s the band who deliver all the best punches. On “Shock Um Down”, the guitars of John Ricco come crashing in in broken, jagged waves, Pete McClanahan’s bass begins to pump like an opened artery and the drums of Mark Evans pound with the menace of slow giant footsteps chasing you through a dream. The explosiveness of the fuzzed guitars and weedy vocals gel on ‘Concrete Frontier’ with the added attraction of a glorious Michael Monroe synthesiser hook on which Ricco hangs some stunning, vicious runs. Curiously, ‘High Road’ is more of a maintenance job instead of a fuel-injected surge forward.

Of course Warrior Soul have their odd excesses (most notably the annoying ‘Ha, Ha, Ha’), but largely this is a bold statement from a band whose back catalogue I’ll be checking out with renewed vigour!

• Johnny Lyons